Is there a better way to lift up your spirits on a rainy day than seeing what your dear old blog looks like in another language, preferrably one that you don’t speak very well? I say there isn’t, at least when just about everything has been translated, even the bits that aren’t really supposed to be.

As WordPress allows me to see which links people have clicked to find my blog, I learned the other day that some adorable person had gone through the trouble of having Google translate my blog into german. I find it quite charming that someone who doesn’t read English has been interested enough to do that. However, the translator has done its job so carefully that for example my blog title that originally comes from the name of a book and a female character in it has turned into a lovely four-wheeled vehicle by the name of Brooklyn!! “Packwagen”, that’s german for “van” for heaven’s sake, I had never even thought of it before! It’s absolutely hilarious, it’s like the name of a cartoon or a children’s book! And what about the list of my favourite blogs, music and so on on my sidebar?! Liquid Sky Arts hits new dimensions as “Flüssige Himmel-Künste”, Ubiquity Records…I don’t even know what to say. And when you click on the links, it’s all in german there too! Fantastic! So, I highly recommend everyone to go and giggle at my blog and many more in german. From now on, I shall continue to do so regularly. I learned german at school for several years but was always more drawn to roman languages in the end and haven’t much kept up my skills in german. However, now I was really glad to have that background and be able to see the humour behind the translations.

Other recommended ways of spending the day include listening to the wonderful Radio Nova Paris online and checking out Satellite’s latest collection of out-of-this-world beautiful jewellery. I’ve also meant to share this gorgeous picture gallery, for those of you who would like to take a tour in black&white Paris, visit “Paris en images”. Cheers!

What a week this has been! Work has been insanely busy, I’m so looking forward to Sunday! Also, our little apartment is a complete mess because we have a new computer. This of course is a wonderful thing but until we get the old one out we can’t use our kitchen table and there are electrical cords, manuals, batteries, plugs, everything from a torch to empty cd’s all over the place. I was laughing just the other night that our home looks some kind of bizarre command center with my boyfriends laptop on the living room floor, attached to a device that enables us to turn our old video camera recordings into dvds, the old PC in the corner with files being saved away for later use (the poor thing will be quite empty any time soon) and the shiny new iMac on the kitchen table playing music. I’ll be scared to open our next electrical bill! But it will all be worth it in the end, I’m sure.

Jewellery making has progressed little by little but I have’t had time to photograph many of them yet, not to mention updating my Flick album. I will, however share this next pair of pictures to celebrate the beauty of autumn. I made this simple bracelet recently and wanted to photograph it in my usual style, on a piece of vintage sheet music. My collection is very small so I couldn’t believe my luck, finding one entitled “Trees”!

I love the green shade of these glass beads! The colours later started reminding me of something and I soon found the image I was looking for, as I had many months ago come across it and downloaded it from Agence Eureca, where else! It’s a beautiful vintage perfume ad for Le Galion from 1957. Ad Vault has a lovely collection of Le Galion ads along with many other perfume goodies. I could spend all night flicking through those beauties…

I’ve been a bad blogger these past few weeks. I’ve been crazy busy and tired but am slowly working on some new jewellery that I hope to be able to show soon. In the meantime I’ll tell you another story and I hope not to bore you to tears.

Earlier this year I’ve blogged about my few but tresured vintage postcards. Almost all of them are from “Borgå Antik”, a charming store in old Porvoo, held by an adorable old lady. She has hundreds of cards there but I only choose the ones I kind of fall in love with. (And I’ve always meant to say that if you happen to want to use these images in your artwork or whatever, that’s just fine by me. If you click on the image, you’ll see the full sized photo as they’ve originally been scanned in quite a large size.)

Barbara La Marr looking etheral with her gorgeous accessories. She’s quoted for saying: “I like my men like I like my roses… by the dozen.”

Barbara La Marr must have been quite a character. She was living an extravagant life already before she became famous, getting arrested in her teens for working as a burlesque dancer in Los Angeles. The judge is said to have told her that she was “too beautiful to be alone in a big city”. Later on she became a success in Hollywood and ended up making almost 30 films in the 1920’s. The femme fatale was known for her heavy partying and also managed to get married five times during her short life. La Marr died of possibly drug related tuberculosis at the age of only 29 in 1926. I read that her career had gone into a decline after having an affair with this charmer here, John Gilbert.

Gilbert starred in almost a hundred films and was a huge filmstar, very well paid too, at the time. In the late 1920s he had an affair with and was eventually left at the altar (!!) by no other than Greta Garbo! After these events it was said that he never really got his spark back, poor fellow. He died of a heart attack in 1936.

When I purchased these two cards I didn’t know who these people were, they were just beautiful faces from the silent movie era that I really don’t know that much about. I looked up their names and read their stories on IMDB today for this blog post and was surprised to learn that La Marr and Gilbert had had a love affair. So I just had to photograph the spot where I keep these cards here at home. For ages the two have been stuck on this old mirror on my desk, facing each other. I’d call that quite a coincidence.